This is the 13th installment of the Complete 2009 CrossFit Games videos, and the second part of the women’s competition. Here is complete coverage of the women’s deadlift event.

This event was the first of its kind: athletes were tasked with lifting one heavy deadlift every 30 seconds until they failed. The women started at 185 lb., and tried to move through 20 bars, each 10 lb. heavier than the last, until the final 375-lb. bar was reached. And this was about an hour after that brutal 7-kilometer run.

We now know how strong these women actually were, but at the time, there was widely varying speculation about how far up the ladder the competitors would be able to go. Very few spectators thought the heaviest bars would leave the ground after such a difficult run, and no one expected athletes to be setting PRs. In spite of the conditions, many women ended up with PRs in the process, including Cyndi Frieling, the only woman to lift all 20 bars, and second-place finishers Jenny Olson and Caroline Attmore (both 355 lb.).

Please note: These files are very large. They are long and even the SD versions are higher quality than the normal Journal videos. They are not meant to be watched streamed. Please download the entire file to your hard drive before watching it (right-click and choose Save Link As...).

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On top of the motivational push from the crowd and excitement that exist at the games, I wonder how many of the athletes setting PR's would have attempted those weights given the degradation of form on the prior lifts. Nevertheless, incredible inspirational.

Thank you so much for the time and effort put into these videos. These women are beyond inspiring. Anytime I'm thinking about dropping the weight or stopping to rest during a workout I think back to these videos....PR'ing DL's after a 7.1k!!! Inspiring.

Sevan, I know you replied to one of my comments on another video, and I'm not sure whether it was something you originally planned or not, but seeing reactions from the eliminated athletes made this all the better for me. They did a lot to get into the competition, and having the competition carry on with ten names just slipping off the list wouldn't feel right, somehow. Great videos.

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.